Mojang Hire Cube World Developer

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Another cuboid/voxel/block post! The blue birds of Twitter inform me that Mojang have hired Wollay, the chap working on Cube World. Notch claims that: “Our current plan is to plug his brain directly to a keyboard and sell whatever comes out.” Quests and other RPG features perhaps? There’s no word from Wollay himself yet (edit: he is ‘so excited’!) but Notch assures that development on Cube World will continue and it will remain an independent game. This potential centralisation of talent vaguely reminds me of Valve casting their sights on Turtle Rock and Nuclear Monkey. Let’s hope for good results and that the keyboard-brain interface doesn’t cause infections.

This is the best news I’ve heard all day! Someone posted a video exploring his landscapes and they were very impressive… Now where was it…?
EDIT: Thanks Urthman! link to youtu.be
This is exactly what Minecraft needs. A lovely bit of care and polish.

Minecraft 2 with Cube World graphics and design, so that I don’t get motion sick just watching a video, much less trying to play it.

Besides, that seems to be the next obvious step to me for Minecraft, improving the graphics and reducing the size of the blocks. The whole world would look better, and you’d be able to do more detailed stuff. (Cube World looks to even have a step up on Terraria, in that it looks like characters can automatically traverse a half-character height distance, whereas a Terraria character stops cold against a 1/3rd character height block.) Unfortunately, it is too big of a change for the original Minecraft, so it would have to be a sequel.

I’ve honestly been a bit disappointed with the speed of Minecraft development lately, when you compare it to the mods people have made. Even if you say compare the last year of Minecraft development to a single mod made by a single guy, the mods win hands down. I hope this new guy will really change things up.

What I’d do though would be to open up the development to the modders (you still wouldn’t have to open source it), and start integrating their mods into the game, turning it into a massive collaborative project. I’m sure the modmakers would be happy to have their best mods ‘bought’ for maybe £1000-10000 and given exposure to the whole huge audience of Minecraft players (considering all mods are already the IP of Mojang anyway).

Not that it matters, but as a software developer, I can attest that building new features is just much quicker from a motivation and development standpoint than tracking down and fixing nasty bugs in the inner codes. It’s only natural that mods would be developed more quickly. I guess that’s why all our roads have potholes. : )

Also, the newbie may not be working on Minecraft, so don’t get your hopes up.

Please leave NPC assigned quests out of my Minecraft. Part of the appeal of Minecraft is that I don’t have a ‘honey do’ list of quests given to me by random NPCs.

However, any work that brings the world of Minecraft to life is greatly appreciated. Quests should come naturally from the environment; for example:

You come across a NPC village under attack by an organized group of skeleton archers. After driving the skeletons back you help the NPCs by building a new defensive wall and then enter the nearby cave to find the source of the invasion.

Guys, this is not a news post about Minecraft, it’s about Cube World. No one said anything about Wollay working on Minecraft now or in the future. But if he’s hired on the day after news breaks about Cube World, they must think it’s worth investing in. For now, it has a nice voxel aesthetic that provides some interesting opportunities in a hack-n-slash, so I’m curious to what it turns into.

I have been always on the Minecraft-needs-more-gameplay camp, but that doesn’t mean a generic hack and slash japanese ARPG. What is Minecraft about? Building, terraforming, exploring. They need real gameplay related and interlocked with these concepts.

This somehow reminds me of how Notch said (and I quote) “Mojang’s mission statement is “Mojang shall be the most influential indie game development studio on Earth”, and we intend to live up to that. I kid you not.” Yeah bro, heard about Valve? They’re indie. A tad idiotic init? Or is that just me?… Alright. I’ll go back and sit in the corner.

It’s Mojang/Notch, so by default there will be people raging regardless.

But anyway there’s probably more reason to rage when someone like EA buys a small studio, because they have a habit of sucking all the creativity out of the purchased company and then eventually crushing it. In the case of Mojang picking up talented people, they are likely to not micro-manage and suffocate their creativity.

Go read all about what happened when EA bought Origin (Ultima Online etc) and how that went south.

There’s a difference between hiring one person on board to help them publish their own game, or devouring a large group of people, wholesale, only to distribute them throughout your minions, slowly feast upon their souls, and then destroy their carcasses in the most gruesome of ways.

To all of those happy the guy is working on Minecraft / angry the guy is working on Minecraft, HE’S NOT WORKING ON MINECRAFT. He’s working on Cube World. This is a good thing because the following things are different:

X-Com and Jagged Alliance.

Quake and Half Life.

Commander Keen and Bio Menace.

Wolfenstein 3D and Ken’s Labyrinth.

Wing Commander and X Wing.

Ultima and Wizardry.

I know it’s confusing because we can’t tell the difference between mainstream games just by looking at them anymore (e.g. Madden 2010 vs. Madden 2011 or MW3 vs. BF3 or any Facebook game vs. any Facebook game), but Cube World ISN’T MINECRAFT AND NEVER WAS TRYING TO BE MINECRAFT.

And theres hardly anyone saying its ever tried to be. I for one think it looks neat, but have an utter hatred for that lazy, sleezy coder, Notch-Whats-His-Face.
Then again, he completely abandoned the one game that gave him a lucky break and made him pretty damned rich. Then ontop of that hes a tad… Douchy.

The so-called start-up model could work very well for games. Fresh ideas come from small start-ups. Bigger companies with more resources need just recognize good ideas and then help in their execution (and not kill the idea while helping).

The other way is the way of Hollywood and we all know what we get with that.